Early Failure Detection and Diagnostics of High Speed Self Aligning Journal Bearing

Because of their high load carrying capacity and low cost, journal bearings are widely used to support
the rotor of industrial machinery with high loads, such as steam turbines, centrifugal compressors and
pumps. However, sudden catastrophic failure journal bearings can result in huge economic loss and
high safety problems. It is necessary to develop effective condition monitoring technologies to detect
and diagnose the failures at early stage and avoid such catastrophic failure. Previous researchers have
studied the low frequency vibration characteristics as well as the high frequency vibration and
acoustics emission for the early detection of journal bearing failure. However, these studies give
relatively little information to the vibro-acoustic characteristics of high speed self aligning journal
bearings. This paper focuses on the condition monitoring of high speed self aligning journal bearings
through vibro-acoustic analysis.